I’m configuring a Mac Pro and would like people’s input on the Gpu configurations. How much of a boost can one expect when buying the Radeon pro Vega duo with 32G each that’s a total of 64G in comparison to just buying the Radeon pro 32G version. Does resolve see the Duo as 1 card or 2? Can resolve utilize both cards equally, or does it use one card more than the other. The work flow would be 8k. Minimal noise reduction. If there’s not much difference in speed between both cards i can save myself a lot of money. If resolve’s usage of the duo can add a significant boost. Then that’s the card I will get. Your thoughts?

Donnell Henry wrote:I’m configuring a Mac Pro and would like people’s input on the Gpu configurations. How much of a boost can one expect when buying the Radeon pro Vega duo with 32G each that’s a total of 64G in comparison to just buying the Radeon pro 32G version. Does resolve see the Duo as 1 card or 2? Can resolve utilize both cards equally, or does it use one card more than the other. The work flow would be 8k. Minimal noise reduction. If there’s not much difference in speed between both cards i can save myself a lot of money. If resolve’s usage of the duo can add a significant boost. Then that’s the card I will get. Your thoughts?

I think we will have to wait for the answers. Upcoming DR software, tests and reviews will show.I went for a 16-core with basic GPU and will decide for computing GPU later.

If you purchase the Radeon Pro Vega II Duo MPX card, it will see the combined GPUs and have access to the 64GB. If someone wanted to purchase 2 Radeon Pro Vega II MPX cards, Resolve currently would see the cards separately. If you can manage the budget, that Duo MPX card should be a great option!

I wanted to do that, but the family vacation abroad takes priority this year! So I’ll settle for the Radeon Pro W5700X when it’s released. I think I’ll be good with that for most of what I do... but I would have preferred to use the Duo card for a feature.

Hi Jerry. Do you have the Mac Pro already. If you do..how is it a least when playing or editing 4k. Have you ran any test yet with the 580x ..I’m also getting the 16 core. The GPU as you see in my post is what I am having an issue figuring out. Yes resolve 17 is around the corner. But I will be getting this computer sooner than that. I want to hit the ground running so to speak. I won’t be upgrading anything after I purchase this Mac until maybe 18 months from now.

rick.lang wrote:If you purchase the Radeon Pro Vega II Duo MPX card, it will see the combined GPUs and have access to the 64GB. If someone wanted to purchase 2 Radeon Pro Vega II MPX cards, Resolve currently would see the cards separately. If you can manage the budget, that Duo MPX card should be a great option!

I wanted to do that, but the family vacation abroad takes priority this year! So I’ll settle for the Radeon Pro W5700X when it’s released. I think I’ll be good with that for most of what I do... but I would have preferred to use the Duo card for a feature.

Rick you’re the man!!! Thanks. As long as it can utilize both cards as a 64G GPU that will work for me. I did forgot about the 5700x 16G. I read somewhere it’s a tad slower than the Radeon pro but not by much. If it comes out before March I’ll consider it as well.

It’s a half-height MPX card and you can install two of the W5700X GPUs, but I think at this time Resolve will only use one for a given purpose. You could point the UI interface to one card and all other stuff go to the other card I suppose.

Does anyone have a rough idea how much better the 5700 will be compared to the default 580 in the Mac Pro? The Bare Feats benchmarks I posted recently didn’t include that comparison.

Donnell Henry wrote:[...]As long as it can utilize both cards as a 64G GPU that will work for me.

AFAIK, multiple GPU cards have NEVER, EVER worked like that. No matter how many 32GB cards you have, it's 32GB of GPU memory, full stop. Now, that's a lot of GPU memory, but it's not 64GB. All reports of the Duo explain that it's two cards packaged into a single physical package, but they present and function as the two separate cards that they are.

Hey Micheal ..can you tell me how resolve utilizes the two separate 32g cards? I was hoping that it was connected by the infinity link it can be seen as one 64G card. Can resolve use both cards albeit separately to give at least nearly a 35-40% speed increase in comparison to just having one 32G card? I know it will use one for GUI ..so I don’t expect exactly double that of one 32G card. But I’m hoping at least to see a 40% increase in speed than just using one card. Thanks

Donnell Henry wrote:Hi Jerry. Do you have the Mac Pro already. If you do..how is it a least when playing or editing 4k. Have you ran any test yet with the 580x ..I’m also getting the 16 core. The GPU as you see in my post is what I am having an issue figuring out. Yes resolve 17 is around the corner. But I will be getting this computer sooner than that. I want to hit the ground running so to speak. I won’t be upgrading anything after I purchase this Mac until maybe 18 months from now.

Will be delivered Monday.Ordered 580 just to feed 3 my Eizo monitors and hope it deliver in pair with my 2103 Mac Pro.Working with 4 BMD cameras in .braw and will wait for some reviews before I decide about GPU

Donnell Henry wrote:[...]As long as it can utilize both cards as a 64G GPU that will work for me.

AFAIK, multiple GPU cards have NEVER, EVER worked like that. No matter how many 32GB cards you have, it's 32GB of GPU memory, full stop. Now, that's a lot of GPU memory, but it's not 64GB. All reports of the Duo explain that it's two cards packaged into a single physical package, but they present and function as the two separate cards that they are.

Hopefully the person from BMD that said the Duo MPX card will have all 64GB of VRAM available to Resolve can comment again on this. It was a question also on my mind when I was considering the Duo card. I don’t know if that function is waiting on a new release of Resolve or it currently supports it. There are people here with the Radeon Pro Vega II Duo MPX card who could also verify this on the current release of DaVinci Resolve.

I didn’t fabricate that behaviour because it’s something we’d like to see. I hope I’m recalling that comment correctly but I’m not spending a day trying to find the comment for someone who is shouting at me.

Donnell Henry wrote:Hey Micheal ..can you tell me how resolve utilizes the two separate 32g cards? I was hoping that it was connected by the infinity link it can be seen as one 64G card. Can resolve use both cards albeit separately to give at least nearly a 35-40% speed increase in comparison to just having one 32G card? I know it will use one for GUI ..so I don’t expect exactly double that of one 32G card. But I’m hoping at least to see a 40% increase in speed than just using one card. Thanks

I don't know how Resolve works internally (didn't write the software), but you can find this written about stacking GPUs: "A common misconception about SLI/Crossire is that you can get double, triple, or even quadruple video RAM with more graphics cards. Unfortunately, Nvidia SLI/AMD Crossfire only uses the RAM from one card, as each card needs to access the same information at the same time."

And it has always been this way. I'm sure that whoever said that the Radeon Pro II Duo presented as a 64GB GPU simply misspoke. The barefeats benchmarks (posted in other threads) do show multiple GPUs speeding things up, even GPUs of different stripes (such as Radeon VII + Radeon Pro II).

Michael, please look at post #15. Resolves now sees both GPUs on the single Duo card. I’m not talking about two separate cards, but two GPUs linked on one card. Resolve will use a total of 64GB VRAM without any further effort on the part of the user.

I hope BMD can chime in and let us know. My main concern was trying to figure out which GPU configuration would give the best performance in resolve I didn’t want to spend an extra 2800 dollars to get a minor performance bump. Even if resolve sees the mpx module as 64 or 2 separate 32g cards how much of a performance bump would you get in comparison to the 32G. The link by Annael just made me ask more questions. The two Vll 16G is faster than the Radeon pro duo 32G. Now I’m thinking maybe the 5700x in duo configuration might be worth checking out

That’s why I’m waiting as well. Wish Apple would define “coming soon.” It said “coming soon” about the internal encrypted 8TB SSD and that only took a few days.

The W5700X 16GB is custom for the Mac Pro I think. Latest technology, fast, and reduced power consumption. What’s not to like? Price?

I guess those two separate W5700X GPU cards that are not linked will be seen as two devices unless someone is going to put two of those with that infinity link on one card. I haven’t heard anything that suggested that though. Next year?

Last edited by rick.lang on Sat Jan 11, 2020 3:24 am, edited 1 time in total.

I‘m on a 2019 MacPro (28 Core,192 GB) with 1 Radeon Pro Vega Duo MPX card and i‘m pretty sure that Resolve sees two individual cards - means we are talking about 2 * 32 GB VRAM.This is what Apple System-Profiler shows.And as long as resolve sees two individual GPUs, there is no reason to combine VRAM to 64 GB.Nevertheless, the system is fast as hell.

I can confirm Resolve sees two Vega II 32GB GPUs with the Duo and uses them both. You can select just one, or both, just like any other dual GPUs setup. The performance is twice as fast as if you have only a single Vega II and it’s the same as if you had two separate Vega II MPX module. It’s also reflected in the price, it’s exactly double the price.If you’re going to deal with 8K, it’s definitely worth it, especially with R3D Metal decoding coming soon (like was the case with NVIDIA with 16.1.2).

rick.lang wrote:Michael, please look at post #15. Resolves now sees both GPUs on the single Duo card. I’m not talking about two separate cards, but two GPUs linked on one card. Resolve will use a total of 64GB VRAM without any further effort on the part of the user.

This is not right. It’s 2 separate GPUs sharing a PCIe 3.0 x16 link to the motherboard. The GPUs are connected via a high bandwidth Infiniti Fabric Link which allows fast data transfers between the GPUs.

However, Resolve is great at using multiple GPUs. And 32 GB of VRAM is great per GPU.

rick.lang wrote:Michael, please look at post #15. Resolves now sees both GPUs on the single Duo card. I’m not talking about two separate cards, but two GPUs linked on one card. Resolve will use a total of 64GB VRAM without any further effort on the part of the user.

This is not right. It’s 2 separate GPUs sharing a PCIe 3.0 x16 link to the motherboard. The GPUs are connected via a high bandwidth Infiniti Fabric Link which allows fast data transfers between the GPUs.

However, Resolve is great at using multiple GPUs. And 32 GB of VRAM is great per GPU.

Thanks for the clarification. It's annoying when marketing people write copy that's technically correct (the BOM for a Vega Pro II Duo includes 64GB of VRAM) but not meaningful in implementation (the practical GPU VRAM limit is 32GB).

Kinda like when NAS boxes would offer multiple Ethernet ports for redundancy but trumpet aggregate bandwidth as if it were actually achievable as a performance spec.

From the link Jerry posted recently, the article mentioned a Thunderbolt 3 bandwidth advantage to the W5700X using Display Stream Compression DSC, but it’s not apparent from the specs below (except DSC supports a third Pro XDR monitor—is that extra XDR irrelevant for 90% of Mac Pro purchasers?) where the Vega II has roughly twice the GPU processing and bandwidth advantage that Rohit reminds us is a real advantage everyone can enjoy.

When money isn’t a constraint, for some well-equipped edit/finishing studio, it might make sense to use the W5700X for UI displays and the Radeon Pro Vega II Duo for computing. For those with limited finances (like me), if the W5700X handles 4K reasonably well, it’s a good starting point where you can add the Vega II later. Since I have two monitors and will likely have two RAID (old TB2, new TB3), the W5700 is a good fit.

AMD Radeon Pro W5700X specifications, per Apple

40 compute units, 2560 stream processors16GB of GDDR6 memory with 448GB/s memory bandwidthUp to 9.4 teraflops single precision or 18.9 teraflops half precisionFour Thunderbolt 3 ports and one HDMI 2.0 port on cardTwo DisplayPort connections routed to system to support internal Thunderbolt 3 portsSupport for Display Stream Compression (DSC)Support for up to six 4K displays, three 5K displays, or three Pro Display XDRsFull-height MPX Module fills an MPX bay and uses extra power and PCIe bandwidth

AMD Radeon Pro Vega II specifications, per Apple

Lacks support for Display Stream Compression!

64 compute units, 4096 stream processors32GB of HBM2 memory with 1TB/s memory bandwidthUp to 14.1 teraflops single precision or 28.3 teraflops half precisionInfinity Fabric Link connection enables two Vega II GPUs to connect at up to 84GB/sFour Thunderbolt 3 ports and one HDMI 2.0 port on cardTwo DisplayPort connections routed to system to support internal Thunderbolt 3 portsSupport for up to six 4K displays, three 5K displays, or two Pro Display XDRs.Full-height MPX Module fills an MPX bay and uses extra power and PCIe bandwidth

Thank you to everyone that contributed to this thread. I’m going to go with either the Vega duo ll or the dual 5700x when it’s available. The 5700x is GDDR 6 which I believe is faster than HBM2. But HBM2 allows more data to pass thru. So that’s why it’s faster on those test. At least that’s my assumption.

I think you’re right given the Vega II is more than double the transfer rate. Hope when the W5700X is released that Bare Feats will update their recent comparisons to include both single and double W5700X configurations. I’m hoping the cost of two W5700X is less than one Vega II.

I'm a bit late to the party; it looks like this conversation is well underway. For what it's worth, my current rig:

Mac Pro (2019)- 16-core Xeon- Vega II GPU (single)- 96GB RAM

Of the three NLEs I've run on it so far (FCPX, Pr, and Resolve) Resolve is, by far, the snappiest. My source and output files are all long-GOP formats; h.264 and h.265. 4K/60FPS. Each of the NLEs handles the files as best it can, but Resolve's handling of them is quite a bit faster.

Now, the GPU. For rendering, it's faster than the upcoming W5700X, as far as I can tell (based on the specs). However, from a hardware encoding/decoding perspective, the Vega GPUs are a couple of generations old and are, unfortunately, a bit slow. When I say "slow", I mean the card can encode a 4K/60 h.265 in real time. If the video is 10 minutes long, the encoding will be ~10 minutes long. There's little that can be done about that because, again, the hardware encoder on the Vega II is too old. The newer 5700-series cards from AMD have a much newer and faster encoder on them. It's assumed the W5700X will be identical. That means it should be able to encode in 75% of the time at the same output type. If not faster.

So, you have to figure out what's most important: rendering or encoding? What do you want to be "faster"? I do wish the W5700X was available when I purchased my rig as I'd have saved some money, and would have a faster encoder/decoder. That's not to say the Vega II is a bad card; it's not. But I'm not spending a bunch of time rendering; I'm waiting for the encodes.

rick.lang wrote:That’s great feedback, Jason. You still have the option of adding the W5700X when it becomes available.

Yep, and I'm (im)patiently waiting for Apple to finally release the card. Then I'll need to see about selling the Vega II. The question I'm still working through: one W5700X or two of them? I have my two other x16 slots in the Mac used up by NVMe PCI-E cards; I'll have to move those around and likely limit one of them to a x8 speed if I get two MPX modules.

Surprised the Resolve is outperforming FCP X.

In my simple tests it is. Specially when working with h.264/h.265 source material.

Eight slots sounds like a lot, but they disappear quickly, especially when using full-height MPX cards that occupy two slots each. I was thinking about only using one full-height GPU MPX and adding the Promise 32GB RAID full height card, but the NVMe SSD Card might be a better use of the slots and provide much better performance. The strongest argument about using Apple’s more expensive SSDs is that they have their own place in the box and don’t take up precious slots!

rick.lang wrote:Eight slots sounds like a lot, but they disappear quickly, especially when using full-height MPX cards that occupy two slots each.

Yep. Here's my current PCI-E layout:

pci.png (63.3 KiB) Viewed 3095 times

As you can see: it's a wee bit busy in there. In order to slap a second MPX in, I'd have to move the "bottom" x16 storage card and put it into a x8 slot, which will halve its potential speed. And that'll result in the second card also slowing down since they're RAID'd together.

The strongest argument about using Apple’s more expensive SSDs is that they have their own place in the box and don’t take up precious slots!

Yep; I have no qualms with the solution Apple came up with regarding the system SSDs. I do wish they'd introduced a 512GB version made up of two 256GB drives RAID0'd together. I don't need 1TB of system space, and I don't use that drive for anything other than OS and apps. Everything else is on tertiary storage.

Lucius Snow wrote:Why would you take so much RAM for your workstation? Except if you run Fusion, you never reach more than 64 GB.

If you're talking to me: there's no such thing as "too much RAM". And fortunately, the aftermarket has us covered quite well with very inexpensive RDIMMs, as compared to Apple. There's no way I'd pay Apple for a RAM upgrade; I got my system with the OEM 32GB and added two 32GB RDIMMs to it.

Lucius Snow wrote:Why would you take so much RAM for your workstation? Except if you run Fusion, you never reach more than 64 GB.

If you're talking to me: there's no such thing as "too much RAM". And fortunately, the aftermarket has us covered quite well with very inexpensive RDIMMs, as compared to Apple. There's no way I'd pay Apple for a RAM upgrade; I got my system with the OEM 32GB and added two 32GB RDIMMs to it.

Jason, I don’t think you can RAID Apple’s Dual SSD configurations as it’s the System drive. So no RAID 0 with whatever pair of System SSDs you configure. No problem with SSDs assigned to the PCIe slots.

I think your slots are cramped but you possibly could still rearrange cards to allow you add a full height double wide 16x card if needed. You would need to move one or more and your performance may suffer as you mentioned. Could a full height (but not double wide card) be accommodated without a performance loss by moving what 16x card is in slot 5 to slot 3 and then adding the full height card to slot 5/6?

The new W5700X is full height, but is it double width or or single width and okay to place in slot 5?

rick.lang wrote:Jason, I don’t think you can RAID Apple’s Dual SSD configurations as it’s the System drive. So no RAID 0 with whatever pair of System SSDs you configure. No problem with SSDs assigned to the PCIe slots.

Correct; I was referring to the hardware RAID setup that Apple uses by default with the system drives. It's nothing you can see or configure in the OS. All of the new Mac Pro's systems drives are RAID0'd; if you look closely at the configuration options on apple.com, you see that each drive option is actually two smaller ones together. For instance, the 1TB option is two 512GB drives RAID0'd. The 2TB is two 1TB drives. etc, etc. The only exception is the base 256GB drive: that's a single drive.

The new W5700X is full height, but is it double width or or single width and okay to place in slot 5?

The W5700X is an MPX module like the rest of the GPUs Apple is selling for the Pro. A second one will have to go into slot 3, which means slot 4 needs to be empty.

rick.lang wrote:Getting tired of waiting for the W5700X card that obvious is not “coming soon.” I think Apple should update their status on the availability of the W5700X to “better late than never?”

You and me both. The current suspicion on "the net" as a whole is that Apple is waiting for 10.15.3 to go GM before the W5700X is sold. Likely some driver updates within the new OS that'll be beneficial to the new GPU.